Wednesday Search Challenge (5/7/14): Find a 360 view from the top!

THIS is the "jaguar throne."  It doesn't look like much now, but it's fairly old and important in the story of the region where it can be found.  

It's a seat of power with a long history, set into a historical context of enormous scope, power, and complication.  But our task today is pretty simple.  


1.  Find the place where this jaguar throne was found. What is the name of the building where it was found?  

2.  Find a picture taken from the top of the building where the throne was found.  (Hint: You should be able to look in all directions with this one image.)  

3.  Nearby there is an arena where a very particular ball game was played.  Can you see the arena from the top of the place where the jaguar throne was found?   (For extra credit: What game was played in that arena?)  


Can you figure these challenges out?  

The first one is pretty straightforward; the second requires a bit of thought; and the third needs you to bit of broader research.  

As always, please let us know what the answers to the challenges are and HOW you discovered the answers?  

Search on! 

A great read about SearchResearch methods

Every so often you come across something that resets your expectations.  This past week, my friend Marcin (an ex-Googler, brilliant typographer, and superb prototyping guy) and his friend Sarah did a lovely piece of research about the building where they work at an SF startup called Medium. 

It's no ordinary building--it's the "Phelan Flatiron" building in downtown San Francisco, 760 Market Street.  And yes, it is that odd, triangular shape that you see in 19th century cityscapes ...  

In any case, I suspect that regular readers of SearchResearch will really enjoy Marcin's posts.  His analysis and methods are really great.  

The first, Mr. Phelan's Building: Everything you wanted to know about San Francisco's finest flatiron, is the history of the building.  It includes everything before the 1906 earthquake, images of the devastated building, and its rebirth after 1906 in the same shape, but better construction. Marcin also describes a bit of the research process they went through to uncover all this background story.  

The second post, Researching the Phelan Building, is mostly about the resources Marcin and Sarah used in their research.  Both articles are great reading, especially wrt the resources they found and used effectively (especially the off-line resources in libraries and archives).  

They're both great reading.  

And if you're a fan of urban architecture, you'll want to follow Marcin on Facebook, Twitter, or Medium: he's also a great photographer, with lots of beautiful images and analysis of the spaces and buildings we construct. 

Searching on... in the cityscape.  

Answer: Horses

Well... THAT was a busy week!  

As I mentioned, I was in Toronto for the annual Computer-Human Interaction conference where I ran a workshop on "Learning Innovation at Scale" and presented a poster on some data I analyzed from the PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com MOOC.  

It was fun, but I was traveling back home on Friday.  Now it's time to get back to SearchResearch.  

Answers:  

As you figured out, this Challenge is really about recognizing that some things, especially things like measurements, change with time.  

The first Challenge is basically all about realizing this (and using what we learned a couple of weeks ago about searching through archival newspapers). 

1.  What was the price of a horse in 1918 in the United States?  In particular, can you find an advertisement in a newspaper printed in 1918 for a horse that would measure 2 meters high? How much would such a horse cost?   

This is a bit tricky, as you have to have the insight that horse height isn't measured in meters, but in hands.  

Take note:  You might have noticed that something was fishy when doing your first searches for horse that are 2 meters high.  You'll get results that are recent, but if you're searching in archival news content, there's nothing there.  Or at least, there's nothing that's useful.  

When you notice this, you should back up one step and ask yourself, "What is it that could be different between now and 1918?"  Horses were still called horses, so the only thing that's left to check is the measurement. A quick search for: 

     [ horse measurement ] 

tells us that in the English-speaking world horse height is measured  in hands and inches (one hand is equal to 4 inches, or 101.6 mm). The height is expressed as the number of full hands, followed by a point, then the number of additional inches, and ending with the abbreviation "h" or "hh" (for "hands high"). A horse that's described as "15.2 h" is 15 hands plus 2 inches, for a total of 62 inches (157.5 cm) in height.

The easiest way to convert the meters into hands would be to do a Google search for: 

     [ 2 meters in hands ] 

which gives us 19.68 hands = 2 meters.  

So in our archival news search, we'd be looking for something like: 

     [ 1918 horse sale 19..20 hands ] 

where the 19..21 indicates a number range from 19 to 20.  

This is a great idea, but unfortunately, this doesn't give us much.  Even doing this search inside of News.Google.com/newspapers (the archive collection) and Books.Google.com doesn't yield much.  

I couldn't believe that all those archival newspapers didn't have ANYTHING about tall horses, so I revised my strategy to search the Google Newspaper Archives for: 

     [ 1918 horse sale "20 hands" ]   -- this gave me nothing 
     [ 1918 horse sale "19 hands" ]   -- this gave me nothing 
     [ 1918 horse sale "18 hands" ]   -- this gave me nothing 
     [ 1918 horse sale "17 hands" ]   -- FINALLY.. a hit.  

The result is from the Gettysburg Times, April 27, 1918.  (Why did I do it this way?  Because the number range operator doesn't seem to be working in newspaper archives... Sigh.)  

If you read the text carefully, you'll see this horse isn't exactly "for sale," but his stud services are for sale.  ("All accidents at the owner's risk.")  

However, the text of the ad goes on to say that horses of this kind (a Percheron) have been sold in Pennsylvania (Franklin County) for around $250.  

Of course horse prices can vary tremendously, but from other items I found, the middle of the price distribution seems to be $200 - $500, with really high-class horses fetching higher prices, going up into the thousands.  

One of the things I learned in the process is that there didn't seem to BE any 19 or 20 hh horses in 1918.  It was a complicated time--World War 1 was still heavily influencing horse markets, and the US was undergoing a horse shortage (remember, in 1918, horses were still often used for farming).  But despite all of that, a 20 hh horse didn't seem to exist!  So we had to make do with what was there--17 hh horses.  

On to the next question, and yet another "archaic measurements" question.

2.  What's the oldest horse racing course you can find that's around 5,800 feet in length?  (The course may-or-may-not be in the US.)   

As you probably remember, horse races are often measured in furlongs.  (Again, you can see this by doing a query for [ horse racing distance ] and noticing all of the uses of the word "furlong" in the descriptions.)  

So we need to convert 5800 feet to furlongs (a furlong is 1/8th of a mile, or 660 feet): 

     [ 5800 feet to furlongs ] 

and find that it's 8.7 furlongs.  This means we need to search for old racing sites that are around 8 to 9 furlongs in length. 

But let's find the oldest racing track first.  The obvious search: 

     [ oldest racecourse ] 

(using the specialty term "racecourse" for horse racing) leads us to the Doncaster racecourse and the Chester racecourse.  Both date to the 1600's, with Chester making a claim as being the oldest racecourse in the world.   There are older tracks, such as those in Italy that date back to the Romans, but these have been in constant use for the past 400 years.  

If you look the the lengths of each, you'll find that the Doncaster course is 2 miles, while the Chester course is 1 mile AND 1 furlong, which is 5280 feet + 660 feet, which is pretty close to 5,800.  

Ah.  

I learned something here.  While racecourses are often measured in furlongs, in English-speaking parts of the world, they're often shown in mixed units.  (Such as "6 feet, 3 inches" or "1 gallon and 2 cups.")  

3.  What's the horse breed with a kind of gait that's particular to only that breed?  

A "gait" is the way a horse moves its feet--canter, trot, gallop--those are all patterns of footfalls that are particular gaits, and they're shared among all horses.  

So how to find a gait that's used by only one horse breed? 

     [ horse gait "only one" ] 

is what I did.  I read about Peruvian Pasos, and Tennessee Walking horse gaits.  There's no great solution for this kind of search problem other than to read a bit, and learn about your topic area in the process.  

As I read, I noticed that all of my results were about something other than "gaits," so I needed to focus my search a bit.  This is the kind of thing that calls for the use of AROUND, like this: 

     [ horse "only one breed" AROUND (4) gait ] 

here I'm searching for the phrase "only one breed" within 4 words of the term "gait."  

This quickly led me to discover that Icelandic horses are the only breed that can do the tölt gait.  It's a four-beat lateral ambling gait known that is particular only to Icelandic horses.  It's also apparently great for covering a lot of ground in a smooth, easy-to-ride fashion. 

 Here's a short video that gives you the idea.  

Search lessons:   

There are many here.  

1.  Sometimes the thing you're searching for isn't there.  Yes, we wanted a 20 hh horse, but the best I could find was a 17 hh horse (which is still a pretty tall horse--1.7m, or 5.5 feet at the withers).  

"Nice searching, SearchResearchers!"

2.  When an operator isn't working, use a word-around.  Sorry that the number-range trick doesn't seem to work in Newspaper archives, but the range from 20 - 17 isn't that long.  I was able to do the search and find what I needed quickly.  

3.  Revise your query based on what you're finding.  In this case, the "only one" boilerplate phrase wasn't working all that well, but using it in conjunction with AROUND works well to localize the meaning to something about gaits.  

4.  Watch out for anachronistic measures.  Horses aren't measured in meters, but in hands.  Racecourses, meanwhile, or measuring in furlongs AND miles.  Beware of mixed measures, which are always tough to search for! 


This was a difficult week's challenge.  We'll take it slightly easier this week with something that's easy to find, but fun and exotic.  

Search on! 

Wednesday Search Challenge (4/30/14): Horses!

This is a bit of a busy week for me as I'm at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference this week, listening to talks about user interface design, the psychology of how people decide to use (or not use) computer interfaces, etc etc.  In some ways it's my "home field" conference, the one I've been attending for many years.  It's where many of my professional publications are, and certainly where most of my professional friends are.  So it's a kind of blend of science, craftwork, and the occasional party with people I rarely get to see.  

BUT that's not the challenge for this week.  Instead, as I was flying to the conference, I went cross-country and as I flew over hill and dale, for some odd reason I kept seeing horse racing venues.  They're surprisingly common (especially in more rural areas where you can easily spot many oval courses scattered around in the farmlands).  

As I talked a few of my fellow travellers about what I was seeing, I started to think about the history of horses, and the following questions came up: 

1.  What was the price of a horse in 1918 in the United States?  In particular, can you find an advertisement in a newspaper printed in 1918 for a horse that would measure 2 meters high? How much would such a horse cost?   

2.  What's the oldest horse racing course you can find that's around 5,800 feet in length?  (The course may-or-may-not be in the US.)   

3.  What's the horse breed with a kind of gait that's particular to only that breed?  

This last noe surprised me when I found this out. I had just assumed that all horses would walk / run / canter / gallop (etc.) in the same way.  It's a little like finding out that people born in Rhode Island have a different way of running than everyone else!  

When you find the answer, let us know HOW you found it. 

(Note also that I'll be flying on Friday, so the answer for this week will also be delayed a bit.) 

Search on! 

Answer: What's the date of this globe?

I'm impressed with all of the energy and good thinking that went into solving this Challenge.  As often happens, *I* learned something along the way as well.  Good job, Researchers!  

Recall the Challenge: 

     1.  What year was this globe made?  

And then a bunch of pictures followed.  Here's the first one: 

Just how will we figure out the age of the globe?   First off, I scanned the globe images carefully, looking for a date, or an edition number, or anything that would be an authoritative mark from the manufacturer.  But I (I and Jon agrees) couldn't find anything.  There's a "Copyright Rand-McNally" in the cartouche (the legend of a globe), but no date. 

So I figured I'd have to start looking up countries that were shown on the globe (or not shown) as a way of figuring out what the possible range was.  

The first thing I noticed was that Vietnam was showing up as both North and South Vietnam.  I knew off the top of my head that Vietnam's unification happened in 1976, but I needed to be more precise. I needed a master list of countries--when founded, and when they disappeared from the world stage. 

My search was:  

     [ list of countries founded by date ] 

This took to me a few different pages, each with a list of countries and their establishment and dis-establishment dates.  

I then had to line up dates that would cause countries to appear, disappear, or change in territorial status. 

1976 - North and South Vietnam unified to become "Vietnam" 

1970 - "Muscat and Oman" changed name to just "Oman" 

"Muscat and Oman" is on the map.  We must go deeper.  Looking at "Muscat and Oman," I noticed "South Arabia"  

A quick search for 

[ South Arabia ] 

told me that "The Protectorate of South Arabia" existed as an independent country only from 1962-1967, after which it became Yemen. This is great, as it limits our searches quite a bit.  Since South Arabia was dissolved in November of 1967, the map on the globe must have been made before the end of 1967.  

Right below South Arabia is the "Somali Republic."  Another search tells me that this country existed only between 1960 - 1969.  This is consistent with what we already learned.  And Socotra Island became Yememese in 1967.  

I kept working in this vein, just checking to make sure all of the country labels are consistent, working upward from 1962.  

1963 - Kenya created.  It's on the globe as Kenya. 

1964 - Nyasaland dissolved, becomes Malawi.  Malawi is on the globe as well. 

1967 - Dominica becomes a British protectorate.  It's labeled as such on the globe. 

1967 - French Somaliland becomes the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas. (Which then, in 1977, becomes Djibouti.)   For this globe, on the coast near Ethiopia and Somali Republic you'll find a tiny country labeled "FR SOM"--or French Somaliland.  Since the name was changed around the end of 1967, this is a great date to use for finding map time boundaries.  

1968 - Equatorial Guinea, Mauritius, and Swaziland all become independent. HOWEVER Swaziland and Mauritius are still marked as British, but Equatorial Guinea is shown as independent. 

1969 - St. Vincent and the Grenadines become independent, but the globe shows them as British. This also suggests that the globe is probably pre-1969.

This pins it down pretty well to 1967, with a little room for error.  The uncertainties in dating (e.g., Swaziland being marked as British) probably stem from the globe production cycle, and concerns over disputed territories.  Who knew if they'd stick around for another couple of years.  This is great for globe makers (countries change--everyone needs a new globe!), but they also would like to put out globes that are accurate for a while, hence the hedging.  The side-effect of all these country names makes relying just on country name changes a bit problematic.  It'll get us within a year or two. So we really need a second source on this.  

METHOD 2: It struck me that this globe didn't seem to have any kind of edition / version or date on it.  Isn't that strange?  So after I did my first method, I started over again with the query: 

     [ world globes publication dates ] 

(Why "world globes" in the query?  A: Because the term "Globe" is frequently used as a company name.  Using the bigram "world globes" was the way that I thought I could avoid all of the companies, and I was right.)  

I found (like a few other readers) that there are sites dedicated to putting dates to globes.  

https://www.antiquemapsandglobes.com/ - run by Murray Hudson offers a nice search tool to (guess what!) search for globes.  Here's their search interface with what I entered for search terms.

I just put in what I knew about the globe (terrestrial, table globe, date range of 1968-1969) and did a search.  Found it!  It's exactly the same globe, down to the code in the cartouche. (Cycle through their images until you find the cartouche--the code is the same.)    

David Mackinder's method:  David did an smart thing and looked for map and globe search tools.  That's a great move.  He found the Biblioserver Newberry search tool.  Using that he treated the code on the fourth picture as if it was a book's ISBN, and entered 'A-110000-751 -2-2-5.4' into search field, to find a hit in their index.  

That's a great trick, but reading the entry carefully, it says that it is: "Dated 'c.1964' in manuscript on attached tag."  That c. means "circa," which is just another way of saying "I'm not really sure, but approximately this time."  I guess 1964 is c. 1968!  

There are other sites for dating old globes, and they're great fun to explore.  Bear in mind that it's really worth checking multiple resources

Search Lessons: 

1.  Communities exist--take advantage of them.  I honestly didn't expect there to be such an active and vibrant community of people who deeply care about older globes.  But there it is.  Lesson for us all, as my friend Leigh Klotz said "This is the Internet.  There's a group of people interested in every possible topic."  What's more, they write about their topic of interest.  Remember this when doing research on obscure topics.  There are always people who know more than you do.  

2.  Second source everything. The method of looking for country-name-changes is pretty good, but it's not super precise, and got us only within a year or two. By using the names + dates on the globe, and then looking for other sources, we were able to find exactly the globe's publication date.  

3. Try searching for collections that might have a description of the thing you seek.  A final note on this topic... an avenue I discovered, but didn't have the time to pursue... 

One of the searches I did was for the Rand McNally sales catalog.  The obvious search: 

     [ Rand McNally catalog 1964..1968 ] 

led to a remarkable find:  the collected documents of the company in the archives of the Newberry Library in Chicago.   http://mms.newberry.org/html/RandMcNally.html

It's pretty clear that there ARE catalogs from 1964 through 1968.  A quick glance through those would satisfy our Challenge.  (If anyone happens to be close to the Newberry Library, could you take a quick run over there?)  

Thanks to everyone for all of their wonderful searches.  The SRS community is full of fun, interesting people that makes writing these challenges a joy.  Keep it up! 

Search on!  

(Thanks again to Jon (the Unknown) for this great SearchResearch Challenge.  If YOU have a great challenge, write to me with it.  We just might try to solve it together.) 

______
Updates: 

April 27, 2014 - Made a few edits to fix up typos. As Remmij points out in the comments, I switched around a few of the dates.  Today I fixed that up, making the dates consistent with the prose. And I added the text about French Somaliland.   

Answer? Not yet...

Folks -- I can't quite get to writing up the answer to Wednesday's Global Challenge... I'm really busy today (giving talks at Rutgers and Stevens Institute).  If you're free, consider dropping by! 

Rutgers talk at 11 AM 

Stevens talk at 3 PM 

I promise I'll write up the answer tomorrow! 


Search on!  (For the next seminar....)  

Wednesday Search Challenge (4/23/14): What's the date of this globe?

THIS is a busier week than usual.  

I'm teaching five classes this week, including a new class on how to search for, find, and use historical primary source materials.  That was great fun, and I'll write about it soon.  I promise.  

So it was with great happiness that SRS Regular Reader Jon (the Unknown) wrote in with a superb Search Challenge for this week.  

Jon writes:  

"My 9 year-old granddaughter wanted a globe for her birthday. I had one kicking around for years that was old when I was given it. Naturally, I wanted to know when it was made. 

It seems globe makers are notorious for not dating the things, so that users will always think they have the latest and greatest." 

Jon sent in some photos of the globe to see if we could figure it out.  

Today's question is straightforward (but perhaps not so simple).  It's a great challenge, though. 

     1.  What year was this globe made?  

You'd think that the globe's legend would tell you, but no.  However...  All the information you need is right here.  It's just a matter of figuring out how to use the information in the pictures to determine when could have been produced.  

Can you tell us?  

When you figure it out, be sure to tell us HOW you figured it.  We're all interested in learning from your research process!  What was the line of reasoning you used to determine the date here.  

Search on!  (And a big tip o' the hat to Jon!) 

Answer: What was the major news story?

As mentioned, this wasn't an especially easy or simple Challenge. Here are the questions, and my solution.  

1.  What was the biggest news story of something that happened in a particular part of Andhra Pradesh during the past 100 years?   (As measured by coverage in the international English language press. For people who want to use other languages, you should find the same result, but I don't know how to solve this in anything but English.)  

2.  In that same year, what was the biggest audio technology story? 

3.  Again, in that same year, what was the biggest story (same basis as before) about events going on in Germany?  

Let's break this first question down.

What and Where is Andhra Pradesh?

If you do the obvious search, you'll quickly learn that Andhra Pradesh (AP) was formed in 1956 by the annexation of the country of Hyderabad with the Indian Union.  AP is now composed of the regions of the small enclave of Yanam, along with the smaller coastal regions of Coastal Andhra, Telangana and Rayalaseema. The city of Hyderabad (formerly the capital of Hyderabad, the country) is now the capital of AP.

So finding the "biggest news story" that happened in a particular part of AP means checking news stories in AP since 1956 AND checking news stories about Hyderabad, Coastal Andhra, Telangana, and Rayalaseema as well.

Now... How can we check for "biggest news story" about a particular topic over the past 100 years?

It's pretty clear that (a) we need an archive of news stories, and (b) we need some way to count the frequency of news stories on a topic over a given time period.

Think about it this way:  What would be the ideal tool to answer a question like this?  When I thought about it, I realized that what I'd like is some way to create a histogram of the "number of news stories over the past century on a given topic."  Make sense?  How are we going to find that?

I remembered that once upon a time, Google News had this capability, but it's long gone.  There are various APIs to let one write code to access archival content (such as the NYTimes Article Search API, but that archive only goes back to 1981).

There are a number of newspaper archives out there, and the first one I checked, Newspapers.com, just happened to show a histogram feature to indicate the number of hits on a topic over the past century. This is exactly what we need to answer this question. 

Here, I've done the obvious query about AP.  And it's easy to see that Andhra Pradesh didn't register at all before it was founded in 1956.  Notice that the UI shows the number of hits in red above the histogram.  

By doing several queries : 

  [ Andhra Pradesh ] 
  [ Hyderabad ] 
  [ Telangana ] 
  [ Rayalaseema ] 

etc.) it didn't take me more than a minute to discover that the major event in the region of AP was the annexation of the state of Hyderabad by India.  That event, called "Operation Polo" (September, 1948) was the takeover of the princely state of Hyderabad and its incorporation into the union. By clicking through to the news articles, it was clear that this was generating a LOT of news coverage, as you can see by searching just for Hyderabad, and zooming in on 1948.  

As an event on the world stage, it was fairly major, causing a great deal of news coverage at the time.  (It was, after all, the overthrow of one of the world's last principalities, and merged 18 million people into India. During the fighting, roughly 30,000 people were killed.)

Now we have the answer:  The biggest news story in the AP region was the annexation of Hyderabad into India with at least 18,746 stories  Even the creation of Andhra Pradesh state in 1956 itself didn't generate quite as many news stories (at least 1000 fewer).  

Next question?  Now that we know the year (1948), the next two questions are relatively simple.  We could do more searching in the newspaper archive.  BUT.. a simpler search: 

     [ major news stories 1948 ] 

will bring up a large number of "What Happened in the Year 1948?" sites.  Scanning through several of them, you'll quickly discover that they agree: the 33&1/3rd LP (long-play) record format was announced in 1948 by Columbia Records.  Reading through some of that content revealed that this was a major advance over the previous formats (78 rpm records) with a much longer play time (20 minutes / side) and an improved signal/noise ratio.  

Doing the same kind of search for Germany in the "Top Stories of 1948" shows that, from the English language perspective, the Berlin Blockade and the subsequent Berlin Airlift to provide essentials to the city during the blockade by the Soviet Union.  Airplanes and crews from the United States Air Force, British Royal Air Force, Royal Canadian Air Force, Royal Australian Air Force, Royal New Zealand Air Force, and the South African Air Force flew over 200,000 flights in one year, delivering up to 4700 tons of necessities each day to the beleaguered city.   This story dominated headlines and coverage for much of the year.  


Search Lessons:  In this case, the hard part was figuring out HOW to measure "biggest news coverage."  In my case, I wasn't sure how to do this, but I started with what I already knew--to wit, that there were news archives.  By doing a bit of exploring there, I found that at least one of them (Newspapers.com) offered exactly the tool I needed--the histogram of hits by year.  Lesson:  Even when you don't think you know how to solve the problem, at least go visit the content--you never know what will turn up.  

Also remember that there are LOTS of people with deep interests in history out there on the web.  Although the quality of web content sometimes varies quite a bit, they DO provide useful aggregations of information... including "top stories" by year.  When in doubt, consider searching for those aggregations and visit several of them, looking for agreement (repetitions) about what were the top stories in any given time period.  

Finally, remember that many things change name over time. The state of AP didn't even exist before 1956.  So checking for news on the state of AP really meant checking for several previously existing regions (with totally different names) that were there before.  This continues in more recent time: You won't find any news stories about the country of Eritrea before 1993.  (There are stories about the region, but not the country.  You've got to be careful...)   

Search on! 

Closing in.... Searching for a tool

Quick comment on yesterday's challenge... 

As several readers have pointed out, the question really boils down to "how can I figure out what news stories were popular over the past 100 years?"  

Here's a hint:  Can you find a tool or dataset or some mechanism that will let you see that kind of overall popularity?  

Find that, and you'll have the answer quickly.  

Search on... for the right tool!



(Second hint in tiny font:  Not all tools are hidden inside the tent of Google.)  

Wednesday Search Challenge (4/16/14): What was the major news story?

A while back I visited the state of Andhra Pradesh in India...  

It's fairly large, with a population of 84M people, making it the 5th largest state of India. In other words, it's 2.2 times larger than the population of California in just more than half of California's area.  Andhra Pradesh, like California, is the "rice bowl of India," providing a large fraction of southeast Asia's rice supply.  

It's been important historically, and given its size (the population of this one Indian state is roughly the same as the entire US population of all states west of Kansas), you'd think we'd know more about it.  

My visit made me start to wonder--what HAS happened, historically, in this region?  Sure, there's been a lot of history, but how would I find out more about what role Andhra Pradesh has played in world news?  

Since we know that the best way to learn something is to link it to other things that are related to it, I have three questions that are all news stories from the same year... the question is to figure out which year.  (Side comment:  This is probably the best way to learn the flow of history--don't remember dates, remember how things fit together in the tapestry of time.)  

1.  What was the biggest news story of something that happened in a particular part of Andhra Pradesh during the past 100 years?   (As measured by coverage in the international English language press. For people who want to use other languages, you should find the same result, but I don't know how to solve this in anything but English.)  

2.  In that same year, what was the biggest audio technology story? 

3.  Again, in that same year, what was the biggest story (same basis as before) about events going on in Germany?  

This isn't necessarily the simplest challenge.  (First question:  How do you measure "coverage in the English language press?)  But I think you'll find it interesting, and I assure you, you'll learn interesting things along the way. 

Be sure to tell us HOW you found the answer.  (What methods did you use?  What resources did you find that were helpful?) 

Search on!